| In this encyclopedic work, Barbara Mella provides a discussion of Derrida's detour -- a term both only alluded to but never explained in Derrida's work and a process in which Derrida's own project of philosophical writing is implicated. With the help of philosphers Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Hélène Cixous and winding through on an elegant discussion of the abstract expressionist painter, Sam Francis, Mella takes us on an elliptical journey into the story of a word. | |
Derrida's Detour [printable version]
Barbara Mella
(Pre/text: or the reason why I will not write a preface
<1> A preface, normally a relatively short piece of writing which introduces a book, might have various aims: setting up an argument, clarifying the author's intention, retracing the evolution of the main text, explicating and anticipating the theories which will be developed later, etc. Thus, whether by the author him/herself or an editor or whomever else, such preface presupposes that the person writing it has already identified the themes or thoughts that will be detailed in the book to follow. The preface aims to be a sort of gate, a passageway from an outside world -- the "real" one with a political, intellectual, social context -- into the world of the text. At the same time, it might also wish to delimit the main text, to establish clear contours by clarifying what such text will be about, and what instead it won't be about. It provides a programme, it sets up a stable reassuring ground from which to view the horizon of the text.
<2> I don't wish to write such a preface mainly for two reasons, which as you will notice are really just one. If I did, I would find myself in a double bind: in wishing to summarise my main topic I would inevitably go against its very nature. Moreover, in giving you an introduction I would contradict precisely what I am going to tell you regarding the function of certain structures (let's momentarily call them that for lack of a better definition), which are precariously positioned between an inside and an outside, on a limit between two edges.
<3> Already, having anticipated my subject, I have in a way betrayed my aim in avoiding this introduction. Thus I wish to interrupt myself straight away and start anew. Without preambles.)
"If there were no main topic, there would be subject for conversation"[1]
<4> I will speak, therefore, of a word.
<5> Yes. You will probably be surprised to know that you are about to read a whole paper on one single word. Did I find so much to say about a word? I did. In fact, there is a lot more that I left unsaid. I couldn't say it all because I have borders to delimit the size of this text. I must draw margins around what I write, to differentiate between what is relevant and what is not so relevant. Between the inside and the outside. I must confine my writing to the inside, enclose it within a perimeter, which forms a circular line, an orbit around the text. I am not allowed to go outside, ex-orbit unless through footnotes or parenthesis (discrete strategies to overrun or spill over the circumference, taking the text somewhere other, on a detour, but always only to come back to the inside of the main topic). But what is the main topic of this text? You must excuse me if I was already digressing, already blurring the borders. So end of note: I will get back on track.
<6> So my main topic is a word. Detour. This word leads me astray towards other words that share with it a certain movement, or a tendency to movement, or something else, which I will try to uncover. I want to talk about ellipsis, about circles and about différance. Yes, of course these words are related to Jacques Derrida, as words tend to (related also in the sense of a relation through kinship). I am going to start with the essay "La différance" in the book Margins of Philosophy (1882). Reading it, I noticed detour, which caught my eye. Derrida mentions the word a few times and relates it to the workings of the pleasure and the reality principles as they are explained by Sigmund Freud in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle." However, detour has ramifications in a certain philosophical context, which Derrida doesn't fully acknowledge. How so? To begin with, Derrida, despite what some would like to believe, does not break with the tradition of Western metaphysics. "Such a break with tradition … is the best tradition of philosophical thought" [2]. Instead, he does something much more subtle and constructive. He engages through debate and exchange with such a tradition in order to exhibit its inconsistencies and gaps.
<7> However, the omission to mention the origins of detour might also be a rather unconscious slip in the best Freudian way, rather than a willing ellipsis. Thus, I am spurred to follow this word by two similar withholdings: Derrida's and Spivak's [3]. In fact, in the introduction to Of Grammatology (1976), on page xliii, Spivak quotes a passage from "La différance" and she argues that
It emphasises the presence of Freud in the articulation of what comes close to becoming Derrida's master-concept -- "différance" spelled with an "a." Let us fasten on three moments in the quotation -- "differing," "deferring," and "detour"…She returns to differing and deferring as anticipated, but she never returns to detour. Why? Is this an unconscious gap? A repression? Spivak, just like Derrida, only mentions Freud (a Freudian non-slip) in relation to the origin of this idea of detour, but no one else. She completely forgets about detour, left to oblivion in the pages of the introduction and to its own devices in the pages of anything else. Yet, detour can be traced back to somewhere else, somewhere that for some reason Derrida forgets or decides not to mention, to Nietzsche and Heidegger among others [4]. Through them, the tracing back of detour becomes entangled with the emergence of other words. As I continue my reading, I start noticing that some of these words have affinities with detour: exorbitant [5], ellipsis [6], circle, etc. So, before I proceed, let's take a little etymological detour:
Detour o n. a divergence from a direct and intended route; a roundabout course. ov. make or cause to make a detour. [F detour change of direction f. detourner turn away (as DE- , TURN)]
n. diversion, deviation, circuitous route or way, roundabout way, bypass ov. deviate (from), turn away (from), divert (from)
De (...) f. L. de: off, from
Tour o n. 1 a journey from place to place as a holiday. b an excursion, ramble, or walk… (2 a spell of duty on military or diplomatic service )… 3 a series of performances, matches, etc., at different places on a route through a country etc. o v. …make a tour… [ME f. OF to(u)r f. L tornus f. Gk: tornos lathe ][7]
Exorbitant (of a price, demand, etc.) grossly excessive, … [LL exorbitare (as EX-, orbita ORBIT)]
Ex… a. out, forth…d. remove or free from
Orbit …4 the eye socket… [L orbita course, track (in med L eye cavity); fem. of orbitus circular f. orbis ring] (- please bear this eye in mind for later.)
Ellipse a regular oval …[F f. L ellipsus f. Gk elleipsis f. elleipo come short f en in + leipo leave]
Ellipsis (also ellipse) 1 the omission from a sentence of words needed to complete construction or sense … 3 a set of three dots indicating an omission[8]<8> I apologise for this seemingly irrelevant and rather tedious diversion, but etymological excavations are not unusual in a certain circuit of thinkers among whom is Derrida himself. In this way, I have introduced three words or concepts -- circle, orbit and ellipsis -- which will reappear again and again in the course of this text and whose paths will cross with the names of three thinkers, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Hélène Cixous, whose writings are intertwined with Derrida's own. Also, through such detour I start to see the resemblance between these words. I could even say that these assemblages of letters and in particular detour and exorbitant, mean roughly the same thing, or at least they refer to the same movement, a sort of dislocation or removal from what is an intended trajectory, a temporal or/and spatial displacement of sorts. My emphasis is on a subtle implication of their meaning. I think that both imply an awareness of -- if not a return to -- what is the tour or the orbit, what is the proposed or due course. They affect a deviation, while keeping that from which they deviate in mind. Of course, one must know the direct trajectory to diverge from it, and one must know where the orbit is to be able to go off it. Thus, if you are in a forest, for example, and you are on a detour, I suspect that you are willingly abandoning the beaten track, distracted by the singing of a bird or the smell of a flower or the sight of a river. You leave your route, you go and hear the bird, smell the flowers, paddle in the water, but turning your head from time to time towards the traced path which will take you to your final destination. Also, a detour suggests a sort of leisurely, moderate pace, "as on a holiday." You could go from A to B directly, walking fast, neglecting the scenery, or instead you could choose to take your time. As I have read Derrida, I feel this is exactly what he does. He goes on a stroll. Derrida doesn't write philosophical treatises with the aim of going from a beginning to an end without distractions. He goes on excursions in the forest of metaphysical thinking. Maybe I am stretching this metaphor too far, but let me see if I can take it even further.
<9> If I think of the orbit as a metaphor for Western philosophy, then an ex-orbit would represent a certain movement away from this tradition, but always within it, or with the aim of returning to it, after a decentering or a deconstruction (de- again) of its concepts. A detour would be a critique of metaphysical foundations from the inside. I have the feeling that Derrida is looking for the right geometrical metaphor for the sort of writing he has envisioned, a writing that will enable him to disrupt the orbit of a whole history of metaphysical thinking. He is seeking a figure that could encompass at once spatial and temporal movements, a deviation from the philosophical tradition and especially a critique of the ontology of presence. According to Derrida, this is precisely the gravest fault philosophy has ever committed: the thinking of the meaning of being according to full presence, which is both temporal (the present) and spatial (proximity). The insistence of Derrida on writing is especially efficient in the disruption of this concept of presence. Writing relies and functions on the absence of a presence. Temporally, it produces a delay, an after-effect. Spatially, it does without the present actuality of its author. In a sense, writing even requires the writer's death to be what it is.
How far have the lonely
stars travelled in cosmic circles since I held you
in my midnight arms [9].<10> Derrida believes that the "'repressive' logic of presence" [10] has worked toward the persistent exclusion of anything that would shake philosophy's foundations or disrupt its internal working: absence, writing, the other, etc. He defines Western metaphysics as "the 'circle' in which we appear to be enclosed" [11]. In "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences," Derrida criticises the circle, together with any other structure which revolves around a centre. The centre is even worse than death. It guarantees "fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude," [12] preventing the possibility of play. It is a paralysing, stable grounding for all concepts within the structure. It gives meaning and coherence to its elements. This centre has been called by different names, but is always derivative of full presence or logos: "eidos, arche, telos,…God, man…" [13]. Thus Derrida realises the need for a rupture in this structure, the need to think of the centre not as a "fixed locus, but [as] a function" [14] to allow for the play of infinite signification. However, he cares to stress that we cannot achieve this play without the language and the concepts of philosophy, but we must establish a "metaphysical complicity" [15] to engage in a (de)constructive critique. In other words, he is recommending a little detour off the orbit/circle of metaphysics, but with the intent of never losing sight of it.
<11> Robert Smith in Derrida and Autobiography (1995) has also noticed a recurrent concern in circles and other shapes in Derrida. He writes
… as absolute non-loss and continuity, the circle symbolises presence... the analysis of the circle is sustained throughout [Derrida's] career -- as if he too were circling around it and had to keep coming back to it from an autobiographical compulsiveness -- from "Ellipse" in L'ecriture et la difference, to the "alliance" in La Dissemination and elsewhere, to the circle made around the neck by tie and noose in Glas, to the encyclopedism of Hegel which he analyses, to the circumcised glans in Schibboleth, to the world-circuit of tourism and travel in Ulysses gramophone… [16]<12> And I shall come back to Ulysses shortly. But first I would like to return to my three words and to the three names I have mentioned. I will start with ellipsis and Nietzsche. To begin with, keeping in mind what I have just said about Derrida's aims with structure and circle, the ellipse has the advantage of being a distorted circle, but the disadvantage of having a centre. However, apart from a geometrical figure, ellipsis is also the voluntary omission of something that is supposed to be there. This suggests not only a motive or a strategy for the non-inclusion of the origins of detour in Derrida and Spivak, but it also provides a convenient play of absence and presence: what is not there -- the non-written -- and what is there -- the three dots representing what is missing. These two meanings of ellipsis come together in Nietzsche's theory of the eternal return. Beginning from a discussion of Edmond Jabès' The Book of Questions, Derrida moves onto Nietzsche, when he comes to the conclusion that
the return of the book is of an elliptical essence. Something invisible is missing in the grammar of this repetition. As this lack is invisible and undeterminable, as it completely redoubles and consecrates the book, once more passing through each point along its circuit, nothing had budged. And yet, all meaning is altered by this lack. Repeated, the same line is no longer exactly the same, the ring no longer has exactly the same center, the origin has played. Something is missing that would make the circle perfect… The return of the book here announces the form of the eternal return… This repetition is writing because what disappears in it is the self-identity of the origin, the self-presence of the so-called living speech. [17]Listen to me! For I am thus and thus.
Do not, above all, confound me with what I am not! [18]<13> So there is something missing in repetition, which makes repetition non-self-identical. What is missing is the centre or full ontological presence. Derrida clarifies this point in a book called The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, in which he investigates Nietzsche's most autobiographical work, Ecce Homo. Derrida considers the initial part of this text in light of the eternal recurrence as explicated in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This is not a cosmological view of the world. Nietzsche doesn't say that the world has and will always repeat itself unchanged (like an orbit or a circle), but he is advancing a moral obligation or a challenge to make of one's life something one will never regret and thus will be happy to repeat again and again. However, this isn't an identical repetition, but a selective one. Repetition "cannot be identical… without abolishing itself thereby. "[L]'anneau de l'eternel retour …. {becomes} a 'retour eternel de l'autre'…the ring of the event…comes into being through this seal of contractual (and contracting) difference" [19]. L'autre being, in the case of Nietzsche, the other which prevents his self-identity. In Ecce Homo, he claims Ich bin der und der: I am this and this, "the both, the two, life the dead [la vie le mort],"[20] the living mother and the dead father. Nietzsche is always caught in this differential non-self-identity, which implies that the self can never be there as full presence because it is always already divided. Thus, when Nietzsche says "I write myself to myself," he is referring to this other within himself that prevents his self-identity. Autobiography, which is supposedly an attempt at self-knowledge, turns itself into an allo-biography, because it requires a detour to the other to come back to the self: "self-identity has to be mediated though an other" [21]. When Nietzsche writes in the first person, when Nietzsche signs his name in his own signature by writing his own autobiography, the "I" is not constituted yet. He does not exist yet. Only when the signature returns back to him via the eternal return is it finally validated. This countersignature affirms the first. I am sure Derrida must have used the example of travellers' cheques somewhere. When you first get one of these cheques, you sign it. Then, when you later present it at the cashier, you have to authenticate your own signature with another of your own signature -- a countersignature -- otherwise the legal and economical value of the cheque is null. So the countersignature that returns to Nietzsche when he writes himself to himself validates the first by repetition.
<14> Now allow me to digress and introduce what you might want to define as the other main figure on the scene -- after Derrida. His name is Sam Francis. "Who?" Well, one day I found myself in Madrid. In the midst of writing this text -- this text was not all that I had in mind. I was working in Madrid for a few days and I hadn't thought about Derrida, nor about all the thinking that had occupied me for a while. Thus I needed some intellectual stimulation. I felt a natural pull towards a museum, like a sunflower to the sun. I wanted to see "Guernica." The painting depicting the massacre after the first air raid on civilians in Europe. A painting to distract my mind from idleness, a painting to bring myself back to all the thoughts I had relegated to temporary oblivion. Madrid, so far from the sea I could suffocate in all its heat. Madrid in the centre of Spain. Madrid the city were Velasquez and Goya and Dalí and Picasso and Gaudí and all the others studied and worked. Madrid the symbol of centralised and institutionalised power all the avant-garde fought against. Guernica. A Nazi officer visiting Picasso's studio and asking "Did you do that?" and Picasso answering "No, you did." I wanted to see Guernica. The painting, which after a long detour of so many years of wandering, was finally back in Madrid because Picasso didn't want it to be in the country before democracy was restored. Picasso versus Franco. Art versus Fascism.
<15> So I walked my way to the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. I had the feeling I was heading for a thread, which would take me back to this paper. A sort of Penelope's link to Derrida. A passageway from one world to another. Truly I was wishing for a "coincidence of meeting" that bafflingly makes everything make sense.
<16> Well, I never saw Guernica that afternoon. No. I stopped on the ground floor. As I entered the museum, I was really looking for the toilet. But I took the wrong turn and I was already on a detour: I found myself in front of a painting and in front of a name. A name that immediately rung so familiar, so terribly similar to that of a saint that I could have thought of divine intervention if I had believed in god. Yet a name I had never heard before. I felt gratitude for this sudden gift. A name and a painting. The gift of a thread. And immediately everything fell into place.
Someone -- perhaps Valery -- has written
"One must always apologise for discussing painting" [22]<17> Sam Francis started painting as a form of survival. This is to be understood rather literally. He begun while recovering from an aeroplane accident which had caused him to suffer tuberculosis of the spine and which had confined him to a bed for several years, partially immobilised in a body cast.
<18> Painting was one of the few things he managed to do. Naturally, there was not much he could see from his hospital bedroom and therefore he had to paint from memory or imagination. But how different is this from any other form of painting?
<19> Derrida, recalling the "Oval Painting" by E.A. Poe, reminds us that all painters are to a certain extent blind. The character in the story cannot see that his young wife posing as a model is dying as he portrays her on the canvas. His eyes are not looking at the original, but at the copy he is painting. Of course, this is not the appropriate terminology, but I am just trying to make a point. As Derrida suggests, a painter cannot look simultaneously at the model and at its representation. At the precise moment when his gaze switches from one to the other, he has become blind to either one or the other. Now, do you remember my etymological detour through a few words, among which was exorbitant? This term comes from ex (out of/free from) + orbit which not only describes the curved, closed course of a planet and other things, but it also means "eye socket" and comes from the Latin for "ring." And here, once more, I glimpse at the connection between all these words: painting takes the form of the exorbitant -- literally a detour of the eye from its socket.
<20> Maybe this is what Monet had already intuited when, towards the end of his life he started concentrating on water lilies. He bought a house with a big garden and he set up a pond where he cultivated the flowers. However, partly because of his deteriorating sight and partly, maybe, because of an artistic premonition, he stopped painting outside. Originally, he had begun his career as a naturalist painter whose aim was to produce a faithful record of reality. He soon realised that this was easier said than done, as reality is not a stable, unchanging and immobile object, but varies and shifts with the artist's emotions. What is seen is inextricably bound up with the sensibility of the seer. So, at this stage in his life, after recording the changing impressions that the Rouen cathedral left on him and his canvases, he decided to go even further and move beyond mere physical vision.
<21> He retired between the four walls of his studio and painted the water lilies that he could not see. Monet was twice blind. By nature and by design.
<22> And so Sam Francis. Of course, Francis could see perfectly well. But when it came to painting, he was completely blind. This sort of detour of the eye that takes the gaze away from the water lilies to return it to the water lilies in the case of Monet, is instead a sort of detour of the "I" for Sam Francis, which takes him away and then brings him back to himself. He started painting self-portraits. But portraits that did not look anything like him. He claimed that the experience of being "forced in casts and braces" made him feel like the cockroach in Kafka's novel [23]. Thus a metamorphosis was what he tried to represent in his self-portraits, so much so that sometimes he altered his face to the point of resembling that of a young girl or of his mother or a Japanese man. These alter egos have for Sam Francis a very similar function to the one that the dead father and the living mother have for Nietzsche: they are the other of himself that he has to take into consideration in his auto/allo-biographical project. Sam Francis has to go through the other to come back to himself. In a way, he has to paint himself to himself -- in the form of an/other -- in order for his face to go back to him, for the "I" of the signature to acquire validity and authenticate his identity.
(It seems that certain buyers would complain about the lack of resemblance in Rembrandt's paintings. What would resemblance resemble?) [24]
<23> His self ceases to be the subject of Francis' self-portraits. In fact, the subject of his self-portraits ceases to be altogether. There is no subject anymore. "The subject, as the necessary element of painting, los[es] all credit" [25]. In the same way as Francis cease to be Francis, the water lilies stop being water lilies. When talking about Monet, Hélène Cixous mentions "the struggle to no longer 'paint water lilies,' while painting water lilies… In order not to portrait the water lilies, what a number of water lilies [Monet] will have had to paint before the representation of the water lilies wears itself out… until they are no more" [26]. She also mentions Rembrandt who, just like Francis, keeps painting his own portrait. And finally, after the hundredth portrait, the painter is no longer the self-same of himself, but the portrait of the painter who has gone beyond himself. "How much time for Rembrandt to cease resembling Rembrandt, to cease clinging to Rembrandt, and little by little to let himself slide, without being frightened, into the resemblance of someone, of no one," of the other of himself [27].
<24> So what do Francis' self-portraits become if they are something other that Francis' self-portraits?
<25> Being deprived of a body that he could move and could feel as his own, Francis felt himself self-metamorphosing into disembodied abstractions. A whole series of them, in different colours. These self-portraits(?) show a continual movement of constitution and dissolution, towards the absolute annihilation of the human face. What originally appears to be Sam Francis progressively turns into a vague image -- a circle or a square. Portraits become mandalas.
<26> Mandalas are symbols of Tibetan Buddhist religion: they are "centralised, hierarchical images usually consisting of a circle circumscribed within a square" [28]. They can become more complex, with more circles circumcised -- pardon me: circumscribed within more squares. They serve to aid meditation by concentrating the attention on the middle of the image, a focus of energy and power where mind and body can find a centre.
<27> However, Francis displaces the mandala from this centralised, hierarchical geometry into a de-centralised series of recurring similar shapes, which eradicates the idea of a focus of attention by dislocating the images along a repetitious/continual line. As time progressed, Sam Francis continued painting these idiosyncratic and personal forms of mandala consisting of series of shapes with variations of colours and positions. Yet, "mandala" also means "circle" in Sanskrit and these series become a sort of circular structure. The emphasised repetition "touched upon the cyclical patterns of nature and alluded to events that occur with cosmic regularity" [29].
<28> Every single painting is similar to the other. Similar to but not identical. Francis says:
Repetition and return does notThese statements seem uncannily close to Nietzsche's theory of the eternal return and because Sam Francis admired the German philosopher, it is probable that his own ideas and paintings were somehow influenced by him. Either way, what I would like to stress here is the element of circularity within this special sort of circle that does not close itself upon itself. Before I continue along this path, I need to return to Nietzsche. But keep this circle in mind.
mean that identical things return
No mandala is repeatable.[30]Allow me one more slight detour, a parenthesis…I am speaking of the tricks and tours [tours] of Ulysses, of his ruses, his cunning [retors], and of the great tour he completes when on his return [retour], he comes back from everything [31].
<29> The fact that Nietzsche writes himself to himself [he probably also talks to himself] suggests that he is double -- his mother and father, his signature and countersignature. He is inevitably implicated in an I-other exchange, which means that his autobiographical project is always already doomed to fail, because it can only, if approximately, aspire to capture the self, but never the other. This is further complicated by the impossibility of escaping the circuit of language in which autobiography is written. Language is also already implicated in the repressive logic of presence.
<30> However, even language can be shown to have an affinity with the eternal return. To speak, to write, we must be able to recognise and repeat the signs we hear/read. If we could not identify them, there would be no communication (like trying to speak Japanese, having never heard it before). Therefore writing must be repeatable. Yet, it also must be different (different context, different tone, different register, etc.), otherwise, we would be saying the same things over and over again. I believe that Derrida is using these reflections on the eternal return in autobiography also to refer to the relation of philosophy with its other. Philosophy cannot define its-self, and construct its self-identity on its own terms: it needs an-other to exclude and to outline itself by default. Philosophy in a sense is the definition of its own limits. Hegel claims that "the sole aim of philosophical enquiry is to eliminate the contingent," [32] but this poses the further problem of a definition of what is contingent, that is, non-philosophy, other: the dilemma is becoming circular. A possible definition of the contingent according to Hegel could include anything that is not relevant, that is personal, non-objective (like a private tale), or anything that distracts the philosopher from the straight route leading him from beginning to end (a detour).
<31> To give an example of what Hegel would probably call subjective or maybe even bad philosophy, I will quote from the essay "Ulysses Gramophone," but any other text could do just the same. Here, Derrida uses a lot of "contingent stuff." He keeps mentioning a trip to Japan, a hotel bookshop, an American tourist, he also keeps losing sight of what he is talking about, finding himself digressing. Derek Attridge, in his introduction to the essay, mentions its "wandering path, [its] intricately plotted itinerary, …[its] circular movements that keep returning to themselves and at the same time opening beyond previously established limits…" [33]. So Derrida must constantly remind himself to return to the topic of the essay after a detour, or to return to the detour after some exposition of the essay:
So I was in the middle of buying postcards in Tokyo… So I am in the process of buying postcards in Tokyo… Before returning to this question (…) I shall hang on to the telephone for a little longer… We have arrived at this point because I was telling you about my travel experiences, my round trip…. If I am telling stories [detours], it is to put off speaking about serious things [the main topic]…Instead of pursuing these generalities (…) I return to yes in Ulysses…We shall return to this in a circular way, …etc. [34]I would like to place a special emphasis on the references to circular movements that appear in these sentences. This is neither casual, nor coincidental. One of my aims in this essay is to attempt to explain why there are so many of these references in Derrida's texts. So far, I have been talking about circles and a particularly deformed circle, the ellipse. Now, I am moving onto detour. To achieve this passage, I have followed the eternal return revisited by Derrida: "Once the book is repeated, its identification with itself gathers imperceptible difference which permits us efficaciously, rigorously, that is discretely, to exit from closure" [35]. Where the perimeter doesn't close itself off with itself, there is a break, a gap, and Derrida takes advantage of this open space to reshape the circumference of the ellipsis into unexpected movements. Detour has the advantage of having no circularly closed perimeter and no centre; of deviating from a teleological pattern; of implying a spatial and temporal displacement. These advantages are not minimal for Derrida. Jean-Luc Nancy compares Derrida's thought and method to the orbit of the planets, which seems to transcribe a trajectory similar to that of the eternal return. "It describes the doubling and the displacement of the ring by means of which this orbit, like that of the earth and of all thought, does not remain identical to itself" [36]. Instead, I would say that it describes the doubling and displacement of the irregular and crazy line of a detour, like in one of those children's magazines where you have to follow an absurd line to find a drawing hidden behind. The difference is that with Derrida you never know if you will reach the end of the line and most of the time, you never know what you will find.<32> Detour in his writing starts taking the shape both of a metaphorical device as well as a structural strategy. As the sentences quoted from "Ulysses Gramophone" might suggest, Derrida is proceeding in a detour-like form, continually interrupting his argument to pursue apparently irrelevant (contingent) discussions about postcards, telephones, friends, letters, etc. One could say that Derrida had not prepared his lecture well and he is continually distracted by whatever comes to mind, letting his thoughts wander. Yet, as I anticipated at the beginning, this strategy is a conscious one. Derrida claims that addressing a question or a problem head on is "doubtless impossible, inappropriate or illegitimate, should we proceed obliquely [instead]?" [37] He admits to have always done so, with the "discretion of the ellipse," [38] with an oblique approach. This is an attempt to disrupt the way in which philosophy has been done for centuries, but with its own tools at hand. The oblique approach "is a choice of strategy… obliged to ward off what is most urgent, a geometric calculus for diverting as quickly as possible the … straight line" [39]. Yet, the oblique line is still too direct, too closely related to linear economics. Thus, Derrida suggests we should forget about it. Instead, we could replace it with nothing other than the detour. The detour can take any shape, and it hardly knows where or when it will end -- if it will. This is precisely what I would care to place emphasis on: detour is a structure of temporal and spatial delay. It "suspends the accomplishment and fulfilment of a 'desire' or a 'will'" [40]. It is a "temporisation": a device attempting to postpone the arrival, the end, avoiding to commit oneself to a closure. I am once again referring to the invisible lack that creates a gap in the circle's perimeter, leaving the circle open. Once the circle is closed, there is a centre, there is a meaning, there is a truth, there is presence. Thus, Derrida's strategy aims to escape the deadly circularity of philosophical practice: "to exceed the metaphysical orb is an attempt to get out of the orbit" [41] through an ex-orbitant detour that looks for openness.
Even though différance is neither a word nor a concept,
let us nevertheless attempt a simple and approximate semantic analysis
that will take us to within sight of what is at stake [42].<33> Derrida seems to have found a convenient way of combining all these necessities and more in a highly condensed formation of ten letters: différance. To introduce this thing, which I cannot call neither a concept nor a word, I want to return to Nietzsche. Despite his famous proclamation about the death of god, Nietzsche claims that we are not rid of god, if we still believe in grammar. Grammar as a master-narrative, an ultimate truth, an origin. Derrida takes him by the letter and tries to murder grammar by working against its internal structures, as a strategy to undermine philosophy, whose governing foundation is presence articulated through language. From this murder, différance is born.
<34> I really don't want to go too much into the term because it's probably one of the most written about topics of the last thirty years. So I will try to be brief. Différance occupies a very strategic position in French. It comes from the overlapping of other terms: difference, which is a noun (difference); différer, which is the verb "to differ," "to defer"; different, which is a verb-adjective, meaning the condition of differing or deferring. There was no noun-verb in French, which Derrida supplied when he coined difference. This term thus plays between a whole series of dichotomies that have always troubled Derrida. It is between "voice and writing" ("a" can only be seen and not heard) [43]; between noun and verb; between sensible and intelligible (it plays across signifier and signified); between word (in French) and concept (signified); "between the active and the passive" [44]. Very importantly, it also incorporates a temporal (deferring) and spatial (differing) movement. Finally, it involves the eradication of presence. Différance is not conceivable in terms of the opposition between presence and absence, because it implies traces of presence: it is "the systematic play of difference, of traces of differences" [45]. Trace is another essential term in Derrida's dictionary and refers to the Sausssurian definition of language as a system of differences. If this is so, then every sign contains within itself the trace of all the others from which it differs. A trace is not the trace of a presence, but of another trace. Every sign is never fully present but determined by its interrelational differences. In every trace, all that is "present" is the absent trace of the other -- its own alterity. I have thus returned in a sort of circular way to the problem of self-identity and of allo-identity that I mentioned before.
<35> Being that it's not a French word, différance doesn't exist. Yet, it is there. It puts under question the question "what is?" and, in fact, it puts under erasure the third person singular of the verb "to be." Derrida writes "différance
(and I also cross out the '
<36> Instead, I would like to point out a small detail regarding this essay, which seems to be very relevant for my discussion. "Différance" begins with a donc, a therefore. In the English translation the donc is instead in the middle of the sentence ("I will speak, therefore, of a letter"). Yet the feeling of being suddenly thrown in the middle of an ongoing discussion remains. Therefore works within a limit, on a limit between a before and an after. This is extremely important when you consider the text preceding "Différance": "Tympan"; and the fact that both texts are in a book called Margins of Philosophy. In "Tympan," Derrida writes
Philosophy has always insisted upon this: thinking its other. Its other: that which limits it, and from which it derives its essence, its definition, its production. To think its other: does this amount solely to reliever (aufheben) that from which it derives, to head the procession of its method only by passing the limit? Or indeed does the limit, obliquely, by surprise, always reserve one more blow for philosophical knowledge? Limit/passage. [48]At the very end, he clarifies what this blow might be. He calls it a coup de donc [49]. So what the limit (of philosophy), "obliquely, by surprise, always reserve(s)" for philosophy is a "blow of therefore." A blow, therefore, which militates on a margin between a before and an after. A blow that occupies this precarious and belligerent position on a border that philosophy cannot fully appropriate for itself. And this is precisely the core of the matter: once the other is delimited and thought by philosophy, it is no longer other, but it becomes incorporated into the sameness of the same. Instead, the limit that persists as limit is an oblique reserve, a reserve that escapes the manoeuvring of reason, a border that will always surprise philosophy with a blow, so unexpected and so forceful to make its foundations vibrate, like a loud noise on the tympan(um) of the ear. It is rather strange that Alan Bass translating the word tympan and the verb tympaniser from the French has failed to inform his reader of another meaning in addition to the one he points out in his note (to criticise): Tympan is, in architecture, the frame of a door and in printing, it is an instrument which is similar to a frame and which allows the actual text of an original to be reproduced on a printing sheet. Therefore, in a sense, tympan is the very instrument of dissemination.What is the colour of the space between? [50]
<37> At this stage I would like to return to Sam Francis' "mandalas." In these paintings, Francis is, in a way, still holding on to a centre. The painting both as form -- the shape or face -- and as matter -- the paint -- occupies the central part of the canvas, or at least a location which is somewhere within its periphery. Instead, in a different series of paintings, which could still be called mandalas, but which I think could be better described as inverted mandalas, Sam Francis abandons the middle all together. His "edge paintings" happen on the border. Only the edge of the canvas is brightened by colour, while the centre is occupied by a vast expanse of undifferentiated whiteness.
<38> Like most so-defined abstract expressionist -- Pollock, Rothko, De Kooning, Tobey -- Francis was deeply fascinated and affected by colour, more than by representative shapes and imagines. These artists are the inheritors of a long series of painterly experimentation that saw colour as the medium to liberate painting from representation. Kandinsky was one of the first to write about, and practice, what might be now defined "abstract art." He felt that painting should reject the intention of naturalism to depict reality as it is. As material appearance is an illusion, art should be relieved by the tedious and unnecessary task of representing objects. Against representation, Kandisnsky and others like Mondrian, focused on the expressive power of colour to provide, together with line and composition, the essential element in painting. Francis, within this tradition, claims
the union of Red and Blue has a meaning that transcends our human understanding. This meaning is what I mean by the meaning of painting. [51]So if colour is the primary expressive component, why does Francis confine it to the edge of the canvas, to an almost imperceptible space that is hardly being occupied?
<39> Let's consider "The White Ring" as an example. The first thing one notices about this painting is that there is not much in the way of painting. The yellow and red and blue are sparingly applied to a thin interrupted line along the border of the canvas, while all the rest is white. It looks as if Francis is trying to paint the outside of a painting: a frame. Now Derrida has said and written much about the frame. But the frame itself is part of a problematic list to which belongs such other terms like the parergon, the supplement and the hymen. Without wishing to blur them all into one, I would nonetheless wish to consider only the features they share.
<40> Let's start with the frame as it really is what most interests me here. A frame stands in a very problematic relation to a painting, similar to that of a preface or an after-word to a written text: does it belong to it? does it not? If Picasso chose a frame for "Guernica," would anyone dare changing it? Would the painting be sold without it? Where does the painting/the frame begin/end? In The Truth in Painting, Derrida considers the frame to be a parergon. This Greek word literally means "outside the work" as ergon is "work." Its common translation in French is "hors-d'ouevre" and the word occupies an uncanny position within the philosophical discourse in general and on art in particular. A parergon is a sort of supplement, an addition to an ergon, something that is neither outside it nor inside it, because it co-operates with the work from within and without at the same time "without being a part of it and yet without being absolutely extrinsic to it" [52]. What renders a parergon what it is, is not simply its being outside the ergon, but its being connected to the inside. It is this "peripherality" that defines it. "What constitutes [it]… is not simply [its] exteriority as surplus, it is the internal structural link which rivets [it] to the lack in the interior of the ergon" [53]. The inside of the work lacks something. It is not complete, exhausted. It needs this supplement to finish it and yet it could do without it. What is it exactly that the ergon lacks? What is it that the parergon supplies? I believe that the parergon furnishes the ergon with a border that in turns provides the ergon with a sealed and manageable periphery, a closed circularity and a centre. The function of the parergon is the delimitation of a centre. I like the word "delimitation" because for me it has both imperative and comforting undertones. You delimit what cannot be trespassed, so delimitation is a form of command and prohibition at the same time. But it is also a reassuring gesture. It allows you to circumscribe yourself within what belongs to you, it creates a safe and comfortable territory.
<41> Do you remember that I mentioned Hegel some time ago? One of his aims was to delimit philosophy. In fact, one of the aims of philosophy is to delimit itself, to constitute and institute itself as a discourse with neat limits. Hegel defines philosophy against the contingent, against what is not essential and principal to metaphysical discourse. Philosophy in this sense "will always have been [necessarily] against the parergon" [54]. Please bear this sentence in mind when you get to the end of the next paragraph.
<42> Because Derrida has written extensively about the margins of philosophy I feel that I can skip the argument and concentrates on what matters to me here. The purpose of Derrida's philosophical writing is (among other things) to create a text that blurs the line separating philosophy from its other, that destabilises its controlled margin and enters a space beyond its limit, a space that occupies a peripheral position in relation to philosophy. Maybe Derrida is writing from the standpoint of the parergon. Maybe he is a sort of philosophical acrobat, balancing himself in precarious equilibrium on the rope of marginality. So he asks "where has the body of a text gone when the margin is no longer a secondary virginity but an inexhaustible reserve?" [55] The margin then becomes this inexhaustible reserve of creativity and production. It becomes in a way the despair of philosophers, just like it was the despair of Proust's publishers. Every time they sent back to the author a newly edited manuscript, so that he could go over it one last time, they received it back with dense writing on the margins, filled with new material and without corrections [56]. Derrida, in proposing philosophy as a writing on the margin, has only made evident an unconscious tendency in philosophy. Because if philosophy is a discourse about the limit, so that it needs to delimit itself by defining what is not itself, if it needs to establish an inside and outside and an object of investigation that is well-defined and finite, then it becomes necessarily a discourse on the limit. And more interestingly yet, a discourse on the parergon, on the frame.
… are you the white
from eternity? [57]<43> At the end of this digression to retrieve the significance of the frame within metaphysics, it might be useful but frustrating to point out that in the case of "The White Ring" there is in fact no frame. I suggested that the brush stokes depict an area that could look like a frame, but really it is not: there isn't a piece of wood that goes around the canvas. The frame is painted on the canvas, the painting is in fact the frame. This renders the matter more problematic.
<44> Yet, I believe that this problem, if it is a problem at all, should be side-stepped. The painted frame is for me and for the purpose of my text, equivalent, if not more significant, than a wooden frame. Sam Francis didn't paint a completely white painting because it had been done before and because colours were his primal medium. He did not paint on a frame because that had also been done before and because the scale of his canvases would have rendered it rather difficult. More than anything, I just think that he did not want to have a frame around his painting, maybe for the same reasons why Derrida has been writing his books. But anyway, the reason that prevented him from putting a frame on the canvas is hardly relevant. The fact that he did paint a sort of frame around a white canvas instead is very relevant.
<45> But to make things more interesting, I should point out that the whiteness inside the "frame," is not lack of paint, but white paint. So there is a painting inside the frame/the painting. What appears to be nothing, is really something -- "everything is concealed (contained) in nothing" [58].
<46> This whiteness inside/on/as the painting introduces a new issue in the picture. One would think that whatever is most important goes to occupy the centre of a painting, the focus of attention where the eye is naturally drawn. As an example, I could mention the famous sunflowers by Van Gogh or Carmelina by Matisse. In more avant-garde paintings, this isn't necessarily the case, as the canvas might be more or less evenly occupied by images or paint that allow the eye to wander from the centre, but always within the delimited space of the painting. This is the case in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon or even in Rothko's chromatic paintings -- Two Openings in Black over Wine for example. Even Pollock's "drip" paintings concentrate on the inside of the canvas. But in Sam Francis's edge paintings the centre of attention is completely displaced. In fact, there is no centre of attention at all and the eye's focus is directed towards the periphery of vision. The eye/I is sent on a pure detour where there is no starting point and no end. I am also referring here to Nietzsche's autobiographical project and to Derrida's Otobiographies.
Figure 1: Sam Francis, The White Ring.<47> It is significant to note that Francis often used wall paint for his projects -- like Dulux paint. This means that once The White Ring is hung up on the white wall of an exhibition room, because of the discontinuity of the "frame," there is continuity between the two paints on and off the canvas. There is a passageway between painting and wall. This passage or overflow is made possible by the gaps in the "frame": gateways between inside and outside.
<48> But let's get back to Derrida for a minute. The parergon is both an external and an internal limit. It has a thickness that separates the limits from the body proper of the ergon, and from the external wall. It delimits the inside of the painting from the outside of the world as a geographical, sociological, political, philosophical, etc. context. "The frame, which is the decisive structure of what is at stake, [is] at the invisible limit to (between) the interiority of meaning… and (to) all the empiricisms of the extrinsic which … miss the question completely" [59]. Which question? I shall return to this question later: let me first concentrate on the frame. The "frame" of The White Ring is however not a very efficient limit, as it is full of gaps which allow the over-spilling of the inside onto the outside and vice versa.
The nothing of
doors and windows
makes a room [60]<49> Derrida claims that "in every closed space there are things called 'exits,' and that's what defines it as a closed space" [61]. These quotations might seem rather naïve and simplistic contributions to an argument, but I believe they are instead extremely important and effective in their very simplicity and matter-of-factness. Cixous claims that "banality is always here to remind us that it suffices to become sufficiently blind in order to see what is hidden and visible behind the banal" [62]. And this sufficient blindness is the one Francis, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Derrida suffer from, or rather, enjoy. We certainly cannot forget that on page 7 of Margins of Philosophy, Derrida uses différance to initiate a new philosophical strategy: "a strategy without finality, what might be called blind tactics" [my italics]. Blindness thus also informs a certain wandering devoid of telos and appropriation.
<50> It is because there are doors and windows that there are passageways between an outside and an inside. If there were no doors there would be no access to a room and therefore the room would be useless, irrelevant. It would be a room that exists only for itself, so extremely self referential to belong to a complete outside which is unheard of and unknowable. If philosophy were a room without windows, its discourse would not be relevant to anything outside it. It is precisely because of the openings that link it to literature, science, history and (why not) to the "real world" that philosophy becomes an essential contribution to thinking. When asked about his supposedly "political withdrawal," or the reason why he has never intervened in nor committed himself to politics, Derrida replies that on the contrary everything he does and writes concern politics: "Ah, the political field! But I … think of nothing else, however things might appear…" [63].
<51> So, to get back to Sam Francis' painting.
<52> The White Ring is an open ring. A ring whose gaps or cuts prevent the circle of the frame from closing onto itself. Nietzsche's eternal return has this very function. It's a circle that despite returning back to itself, doesn't seal itself into an hermetically fastened circumference. As I have mentioned earlier, there is an imperceptible gap that prevents the two ends of the circular line to touch each other and this gap is the lack of self-identity.
<53> But The White Ring is more. It is also a ring, like a wedding band that guarantees a matrimonial contract. It's like the countersignature to a signature to assure the return of the "I" to oneself after the detour to/of the other. But wait a minute: I might be getting all mixed up now. The white ring? But the white is inside and the ring is coloured, not white. What does the whiteness inside mean? Why is it there? Francis says:
the space atYou as the viewer, the other of the artist, the one who in order to find himself or herself has to go inside the panting and then come back. Francis is offering his reader the same experience of blindness and detour he has experienced himself. He is asking the viewer to go through the same labour and work of self/allo discovery. He is not giving away a truth to be picked and manipulated easily. He incites:
the centre
of these paintings
is reserved
for you [64]get it for yourself
it's there at the centre of the work [65]<54> I will return to this selfishness and generosity later, but regarding Derrida. Now, I was saying that the ring is there to seal a contract, like a wedding vow. But the ring is open, not sealed. Does this mean that the contract is not valid, that the signature does not return to Sam Francis? Even more so. It allows for a multiplicity of interruptions and detours to the other. It opens up the inside space to welcome the contamination from the outside space and the other way round. The interrupted or broken ring introduces a break in discourse and keeps continuity and discontinuity going at the same time. It's not a refusal of the ring, of the signature and of the contract. Instead, it embodies the necessity to inscribe or mark the ring with the other, with the non-ring, the gap. I have already noted that philosophy is like a circle continuously trying to police its perimeter. This is why before mentioning Sam Francis for the first time I had to apologise: because any discussion on painting is "perhaps destined to reproduce the limit which constitutes them, whatever they do and whatever they say: there is for them an inside and an outside to the work as soon as there is a work" [66]. This apology is a sort of warning against a certain philosophical discourse on painting which is bound to insert art into the philosophical circle and to transform this very discourse even more into "a circle in a circle of circles: a 'ring'" [67]. Instead my intention is completely other. I would like to escape the circle that leaves no way out, which is why I have been drawn to a broken circle with openings and cuts.
<55> These cuts could also recall more violent cuts, like those of circumcision. Derrida becomes autobiographical in his later texts, and in one in particular he talks about his circumcision. This practice, as described in Circumfession, recalls the physiognomy of the eternal return. As a rite of passage, circumcision allows a cycle of life to move into a new one. It is a closure that is not a closure because it's maintained open by a cut. An invisible abrasion that prevents final healing, as the scar remains despite the eye being blind to it.
Even with his arrival,
the returning one has not yet reached home [68].<56> If you remember at the very beginning I mentioned two names to which detour could be connected. I have talked about Nietzsche and now I would like to mention Heidegger as anticipated. I will consider an essay entitled "The Remembrance of the Poet" on Holderlin's poem "Homecoming." In this poem, the poet is the person who is always in the process of coming home: "all the poems of the poet who has entered his poethood, are poems of homecoming" [69]. Heidegger believes that people become so familiar with what surrounds them, that they are incapable of grasping its essence, its truth. Even home suffers from such over familiarity. Its essence is at once offered but withheld to its inhabitants. One must therefore be able to see home from a new perspective to see it as what it really is. Those who remain at home stay in a protective and comfortable environment and never question home with the eyes of an outsider. Homecoming then becomes the possibility of a return that is "only possible for one who has… borne on his shoulders, as the wanderer, the burden of the voyage" [70]: only those who have left can return. This homecoming is a temporal and spatial displacement, a différance, the eternal return of the non-identical. Heidegger regards the writing of poetry as a process that is fundamentally similar to homecoming. He considers poetry any form of writing/art allowing one to see things as if for the first time.
<57> Because language is the foundation of philosophy, we could make a connection between poets and philosophers. There are those who stay within the confines of Western metaphysical thought and those who take a detour in the form of criticism in order to return. Homecoming is an inaugural event that starts deconstruction. Homecoming is a possibility only for the wanderer, like Odysseus, who tempts his fate and risks his life. But the wanderer always comes home. The return is necessary to see things anew, to search for a point of origin. This is why Derrida the wanderer always returns to philosophy and to its origins (Plato, for example).
The painter, the true painter, doesn't know how to paint. He looks for the secret. He will put his life into it. The painter is always Percival. He sets off, he leaves the forest, but in order to come back, on his way around the world, to the forest [71].
<58> Before ending, I would like to expand on the writer I have mentioned here and there, Hélène Cixous. Between her and Derrida there is mutual admiration and support [72]. In a way, Cixous could be said to out-derrida Derrida, because starting from the same premises, she has taken his thoughts further in a creative way. Her deconstruction is more reconstructive than Derrida has allowed himself to be. Only recently he has let his creativity run free. Maybe this is because he felt a moral obligation, like a belief in eternal return, towards the project that had been called deconstruction: the decentering and dismantling of metaphysical thought. Derrida elaborated this term from the Heideggerian Destruktion and Abbau, which have a double meaning: both disordering and re-arranging. The word also comes from the old French and has the meaning of taking machines apart to move them somewhere else and build them again. The term thus involves a final creative or re-creative phase of re-construction under new conditions, but with the same elements -- a sort of detour if you wish. In this sense, because it works with the same old elements, deconstruction has a certain conservative character, rather than a revolutionary one. Derrida might have felt he had accomplished enough deconstructive work, enough at least to set others in motion toward the same movement, enough to start on his re-constructive writing with texts like "Circumfession, fifty-nine periods and periphrases" [73] which are private accounts of a life, a thought. In this text he writes about his circumcision:
I call it circumcision, see the blood, but also what comes, cauterization, coagulation or not, strictly contain the outpouring of circumcision, one circumcision, mine, the only one, rather than circumnavigation or circumference, although the unforgettable circumcision has carried me to the place I had to go to, and circumfession if I want to say and to do something of an avowal without truth turning around itself, an avowal without "hymn" (hymnology) and without virtue (aretaology), without managing to close itself on its possibility, unsealing, abandoning the circle open, wandering on the periphery, taking the pulse of an encircling phrase, the pulsion of the paragraph which never circumpletes itself, as long as the blood, what I call thus and thus call, continues its venue in its vein. [74]It might be superfluous to stress the still present obsession and concern with circles, circularity and open circles. However, I am digressing. I said I was going to talk about Cixous. In fact, I only want to mention a passage from an essay. "The Last Painting" is about Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, and about the immediacy of painting, which is a sort of epiphany, a sudden realisation of the essence and truth of something painted. She laments that as a writer, she cannot give to her reader this immediacy. Monet gives water lilies, but she has to "make detours and go through texts" [75]. She further expands on this and talks about paths. She saysBut there is a path. It makes us go around the world to regain the second innocence. It's a long path. Only at the end of the path can we regain the force of simplicity or of nudity…One must have travelled a great deal to discover the obvious…There are poets who have strived to do this. I call "poet" any writing being who sets out on this path, in quest of what I call the second innocence, the one that comes after knowing, the one that no longer knows, the one that knows how not to know… [76]<59> Paths, journeys, detours, returns,…This is what I have been attempting to tell you about. It seems that writing for Derrida (and others) is a trip, like a holiday, a walk, whose importance is not arriving, but getting there, whose importance is not-arriving. Cixous, in another book, mentions the Russian poet Ossip Mandelstam, who always wrote while walking, and who asked how many shoes Dante must have worn out to write La Divina Commedia. Thus, Cixous says that "the true poet is a wanderer. Poetry is about travelling…" [77]. So I wonder how many shoes Derrida has consumed to write all the books he has written, and how many journeys to Japan, Italy, America, England, Ireland…
Working in the Dark [78]
<60> Now, the path that recovers this second innocence, as Cixous defines it, is the same path that recovers the second vision, the one that no longer sees, the one that comes after the detour of vision through blindness: the blindness of the poet as much as the blindness of the painter. It is interesting that at the beginning of Memoirs of the Blind Derrida mentions that he often writes in the dark, because Cixous refers to someone who instead reads in the dark. She is talking about Thomas Bernhard who takes refuge in the corner of a tower to escape his family, and there, without putting the light on -- so not to be discovered -- he reads in the dark a book by Montaigne [79]. He doesn't know yet what he's reading because he chose the book in absolute darkness -- a blind choice. The act of choosing and the act of reading are blind. Just like the act of painting and writing. So where does the light comes from? In the return of the act to you. Like a countersignature. "Here's the light, in the relationship with Montaigne" [80].
<61> And so Monet. After, his double blindness (effective and imposed) he recovers sight through the water lilies. He was the first painter to use such vast canvas. All his previous works were like windows on reality, where a frame was necessary to isolate and contain art from nature. But with the paintings of the water garden he dispenses with the frame altogether, in fact, he extends the dimensions of the canvas to occupy the entire field of vision and he bends them and curve them to follow the curvature of sight. The water lilies replace Monet's former vision.
<62> With Sam Francis, the story is less metaphorical. He literally recovers sight as life from painting. His work secures his survival. He sends his signature off into the canvas hoping that it will return back to him. And it does -- guaranteeing a new lease on life, a new contract.
I have decided to stop here because I almost had an accident just as I was jotting down this last sentence, when, on leaving the airport, I was driving home after the trip to Tokyo.
<63> This is how "Ulysses Gramophone" ends. I also have decided to stop here, because I must go and feed the cat. Yes. I have tried to avoid presenting my topics in a direct and straightforward way, to prevent a general summarisation of the essay as: "it is about this and that." I have also tried to give it a structure that could avoid being summarised as teleological: "it begins like this, continues like that and finishes like this." You might say that because of this strategy, the essay is unclear, you could even accuse it of going around in circles. But being that circles are one of its topics, could that be regarded as a fault?
<64> You might remember that some time ago, I asked "which question?." I think that more than anything in this essay, I have been circling around a question. A question that I dare not formulate. Probably the question sounds something like "what is philosophy?" or even "what is art?," or maybe "what is literature?." I don't think I've been able to give a coherent or appropriate answer, but that wasn't my intention. Because the problem with this question is not so much that it cannot be answered but that it cannot even be asked.
<65> So why did I write an essay about a question I cannot ask? The explanation might seem banal but here it is -- as Cixous explains it: "thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort," just like "painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint" [81]. It's easy to paint an apple, but it's difficult to paint the impression of an apple or the thought of an apple and especially, it's difficult to paint the question of an apple. This effort is beyond vision, on the side of blindness.
<66> The blindness that becomes constituent in the act of painting is an absolutely philosophical need. By this I don't mean a philosophical need for art, but a proper need for philosophy. This blindness is not a non-seeing, but an uncanny way of seeing. It involves an effort not to see violently or objectively -- that is, philosophically. To explain what I am saying, I will seek the help of another French thinker, Maurice Blanchot. In an essay entitled "Speaking is not Seeing," he differentiates a very particular form of speech from sight as "the optical imperative that in Western tradition, for thousands of years, has subjugated our approach to things" [82]. So the painter sees with the new vision that is a blindness that sees without a masterful intent. It's very interesting that Francis started painting in a hospital because Cixous has something to say about sight in this particular place: "In the hospital we have a vision of the world that differs from the one in which one acts as if human beings were not mortal" [83]. Of course, with extreme simplicity and economy, she is saying what took Heidegger 500 pages to say in Being and Time and what Nietzsche meant with the eternal return. She is also going back to the homecoming argument, because hopefully, after the hospital, the patient returns home and sees beyond the economy of the ordinary vision -- which, of course, prevents us from seeing.
<67> You might have thought that I was using art as a detour from philosophy. Instead, I have not been using art, but art has manifested itself as detour. A detour that circles around a question that cannot be asked. And I might have to return to Blanchot now to make myself clearer. A question demanding for an answer is immediately terminated: "the answer is the question's misfortune" [84]. A question inaugurates a realm of possibility and of movement that is instantaneously sealed by an answer. With the answer, an opening is closed. This is the reason why certain questions cannot be answered.
<68> But why can't it be asked? The moment that you phrase a question, the form of the question calls for an answer. But this answer necessarily terminates the possibility and openness of the question. The answer re-inscribes the openness into the enclosed circularity of metaphysical thought. It interrupts the movement of flow that is initiated by the possibility of a question, not by the question itself. The possibility of a question is a detour away from questioning. This possibility of questioning as detour is what "cannot be seized by an affirmation, nor refused by a negation, nor raised up to possibility by interrogation" [85].
<69> This is why I cannot ask the question about art or about philosophy, of how art raises the question of philosophy. I have looked at a painting that raises the question of philosophy, but more fundamentally it raises the question of painting itself. In a way it's similar to poetry in the sense meant by Cixous and Blanchot, as a movement of language away from language, a detour of language.
<70> These are the reasons why I have been going around in circles around I question I could not asked. So now I better cut it short.
<71> The last thing I wish to say is that I haven't tried to imitate Derrida's style. If I did I would have missed the point. The problem with writing about Derrida is that you have to write about writing. And the problem with writing about language in Derrida is that you have to write about language in general. It's a sort of a catch-22 situation. You cannot use the language that has been used so far, but you shouldn't even use Derrida's language. You cannot imitate someone who does not imitate. Someone who occupies in his writing the space opened up by his reading. So what I have been trying to do is to allow myself to take a more open approach to discourse to talk about discourse. Moreover, as Derrida suggests, there is a lot of work involved on this side of writing, which is reading. This is why they are two blind acts, writing and reading. "We write in the dark, we read in the dark: they are the same process" [86]. Derrida's writing is a reading. His own reading of someone else's writing. It's a personal act, a selfish act if you will, which he does for himself alone. This is why Derrida is difficult to read. Because he doesn't write for others to understand. He writes for his own understanding. When he writes, he's actually reading. So the reader of Derrida has to go through the same process, the same labour -- because reading involves creating. It's a selfish but generous act. Selfish and generous. Because when Derrida reads/writes he also gives so much by giving nothing away. He never says: "and this is how things are, this is the truth, etc." He almost refuses to put things into words. Like Francis. Like Pollock. Jackson Pollock is renowned for refusing to explain his paintings, he claimed there was nothing to add, they contained all he had to say. The difference is that Derrida never stops talking. He keeps on writing and writing. Sometime I wonder whether there isn't an entourage of students or scholars who write for him, "behind his back" and then he signs his proper name on the cover of the book. He never stops, really. How many books has he written? Fifty? More? But despite all the words he has written he avoids putting things to words. This is the detour of language away from itself. Of philosophy away from itself.
<72> Therefore…
Notes
[1] Kafka, "Conversation Slips," in Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, p. 419 [^]
[2] Gasché, Inventions of Difference, p. 59 [^]
[3] an amusing detour: my computer spell-check keeps trying to change Spivak into Spinach [^]
[4] For the usual problems of limits and perimeters I will only consider the two writers whom Derrida mentions all the time. [^]
[5] Derrida in "The Exorbitant. Question of Method" in Of Grammatology [^]
[6] Derrida in "Ellipsis" in Writing and Difference [^]
[7] lathe /layth/ n. a machine for shaping wood, metal, erc., by means of a rotating drive which turns the piece by being worked on against changeable cutting tools [^]
[8] The Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus [^]
[9] Francis, Saturated Blue, no page numbers [^]
[10] Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. xi [^]
[11] Derrida, "Différance," p.12 [^]
[12] Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 279 [^]
[13] Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 279/280 [^]
[14] Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 280 [^]
[15] Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 281 [^]
[16] Smith, Derrida and Autobiography, p. 77 [^]
[17] Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 296 [^]
[18] Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, p. 3 [^]
[19] 'The circle of the eternal return becomes an eternal return of the other' (personal translation), Smith, p. 85 [^]
[20] Derrida, Otobiographies, p. 17 [^]
[21] Smith, Derrida and Autobiography, p. 35 [^]
[22] Blanchot, Friendship, p. 12 [^]
[23] Sam Francis: Elements and Archetypes, p. 206 [^]
[24] Cixous, Stigmata, p. 13 [^]
[25] Kandinsky, in Claude Monet, p. 80 [^]
[26] Cixous, Coming to Writing, p. 124 [^]
[27] Cixous, Coming to Writing, p. 125 [^]
[28] Sam Francis: Elements and Archetypes, p. 198 [^]
[29] Sam Francis: Elements and Archetypes, p. 198 [^]
[30] Francis, Saturated Blue, no page numbers and Sam Francis: Elements and Archetypes, p. 198 [^]
[31] Derrida, Acts of Literature, p. 259 and 292-3 [^]
[32] quoted in Smith, Derrida and Autobiography, p, 13 [^]
[33] Derrida in Attridge, Acts, p. 253 [^]
[34] Derrida in Attridge, Acts, pp.253-309 [^]
[35] Writing and Difference, p. 295 [^]
[36] Wood, Derrida: A Critical Reader, p. 36 [^]
[37] Wood, Derrida, p. 11 [^]
[38] Wood, Derrida, p. 10 [^]
[39] Wood, Derrida, p. 13 [^]
[40] Derrida, "Différance," p. 8 [^]
[41] Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 162 [^]
[42] Derrida, "Différance," p. 7 [^]
[43] Derrida, "Différance," p. 5 [^]
[44] Derrida, "Différance," p. 9 [^]
[45] Derrida, Semiology and Grammatology, p. 27 [^]
[46] Derrida, 'Différance', p. 6 [^]
[47] See for example: Derrida and Différance or Inventions of Difference [^]
[48] Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. x-xi [^]
[49] Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. xxix [^]
[50] Francis, Saturated Blue, no page numbers [^]
[51] Francis, Saturated Blue, no page numbers [^]
[52] Derrida, Truth in Painting, p. 55 [^]
[53] Derrida, Truth in Painting, p. 59 [^]
[54] Derrida, Truth in Painting, p. 54, Derrida's italics [^]
[55] Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. xxiii [^]
[56] See Benjamin's "The Image of Proust" in Illuminations. [^]
[57] Francis, Saturated Blue, no page numbers [^]
[58] Francis, Saturated Blue, no page numbers [^]
[59] Derrida, Truth in Painting, p. 62 [^]
[60] Francis, Saturated Blue, no page numbers [^]
[61] Derrida, Otobiographies, p. 129 [^]
[62] Cixous, Readings, p. 99 [^]
[63] Derrida, Points, p.86 [^]
[64] Francis, Saturated Blue, no page numbers [^]
[65] Francis, Saturated Blue, no page numbers [^]
[66] Derrida, Truth in Painting, p. 7 [^]
[67] Derrida, Truth in Painting, p. 23 [^]
[68] Heidegger, Existence and Being, p.263 [^]
[69] Heidegger, Existence and Being, p. 253 [^]
[70] Heidegger, Existence and Being p. 279 [^]
[71] Cixous, Coming to Writing, p. 110 [^]
[72] see for example, Derrida's foreword to Cixous' Reader. [^]
[73] in Derrida and Bennington, Jacques Derrida, [^]
[74] Derrida, Derrida, p. 14 [^]
[75] Cixous, Coming to Writing, p. 108 [^]
[76] Cixous, Coming to Writing, p. 115 [^]
[77] Cixous, Three Steps, p. 64 Francis, Saturated Blue, no page numbers [^]
[78] Francis, Saturated Blue, no page numbers [^]
[79] See Cixous, Three Steps, p. 22-23 [^]
[80] Cixous, Three Steps, p. 23 [^]
[81] Cixous Three Steps, p. 38 [^]
[82] Blanchot Infinite Conversation, p.27 [^]
[83] Cixous Readings, p. 98 [^]
[84] Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, p. 13 [^]
[85] Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, p. 21 [^]
[86] Cixous Three Steps, p. 27 [^]
Works Cited
works by Jacques Derrida
1976, Of Grammatology, tr. G. Spivak, London: The John Hopkins University Press
1978, Spurs, Nietszche's Styles, London: Chicago University Press
1978, Writing and Difference, tr. A. Bass, London: Routledge
1979, "Living On," in Deconstruction and Criticism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
1981, Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson, London: The Athlone Press
1981, "Semiology and Grammatology," in Positions, trans. A. Bass, Chicago, Chicago University Press
1982, Margins of Philosophy, tr. A. Bass, Chicago: Chicago University Press
1987, The Truth in Painting, tr. G. Bennington & i. Meleod, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press
1992, Acts of Literature, ed. D. Attridge, London: Routledge
1993, Memoirs of the Blind: the Self-Portrait and other Ruins, tr. P. Brault & M. Naas, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press
1993, Jacques Derrida, with G. Bennington, London: Chicago University Press
1995, Points…: Interviews 1974-1994, ed. E. Weber, tr. P. Kamuf, Stanford: Stanford University Press
19???, The Ear of the Other, Otobiography, Transference, Translation, Texts and Discusions with Jacques Derrida, London: University of Nebraska Press
other works cited
Blanchot, Maurice, 1992, The Infinite Conversation, tr. S. Hanson, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press
Cixous, Hélène, 1991, Coming to Writing and Other Essays, London, Harvard University Press
---, 1992, Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Fafka, Kleist, Lispector and Tsvetayeva, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf
---, 1993, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, New York, Columbia University Press
Francis, Sam, 1995, Saturated Blue: Writings from the Notebook, Los Angeles: Lapis Press
Gascheé, R., 1994, Inventions of Difference: on Jacques Derrida, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press
Guillard, J. & M. (ed.), 1983, Claude Monet at the Time of Giverny, Paris: Guillard
Heidegger, Martin, 1949, Existence and Being, London: Vision Press
Nietszche, F., 1992, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books
Smith, R., 1995, Derrida and Autobiography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Zakian, M. (curator), 1997, Sam Francis: Elements and Archetypes, Madrid: Fundacion Caja de Madrid
Wood, D. ed., Derrida: A Critical Reader, 1992, Oxford: Blackwell